talism has made in our country! The joyous celebrations of V-J Day were not yet over when thousands of workers were laid off in war plants, shipyards, and factories. Although there is a market for innumerable commodities which people actually need, the leading employers have showed no great haste in proceeding to reconversion. Why should they, with enormous tax rebates in the offing to cover all in their so-called "losses"?
Bloated with war profits and licking their chops over the prospective presents from Uncle Sam ($149,000,000 to U. S. Steel alone, for example, for the coming year) they entered into what Mr. Philip Murray, President of the C.I.W., calls correctly, "an evil conspiracy"—a plot to smash labor unions and to destroy price control. The National Association of Manufacturers has announced a press and radio campaign against price control that will cost a million dollars. They are interested in raising prices on everything except labor-power, namely, wages.
Labor worked devotedly to turn out the goods for our fighting men, kept its "no-strike pledge" under the greatest provocation and a pyramiding of unsolved grievances. The pay-off now is wage cuts, price raises, injunctions, the spectre of unemployment. The returned veteran meets a cheerless welcome—no jobs, no homes, no clothes, and no adequate provisions for his assistance in securing these essentials.
Negroes—soldiers and civilians alike—are even more shamefully Jim-Crowed than before the war by segregation, discrimination, downgrading in employment and by violence. Two Negro brothers, a soldier in uniform and a veteran, were brutally slain by a policeman in Freeport, L. I. A third brother, a sailor in the U. S. Navy, was badly wounded. The young men had protested in a bus terminal restaurant when service was refused them. In a Ku-Klux stormtrooper atmosphere, an all-white Grand Jury of property owners white-washed the killer-cop and said, "He was justified in doing what he did." The same ugly spirit animated the disgraceful filibuster against the Fair Employment Practices Committee (F.E.P.C.) which makes a mockery of our representative government.
The Rankin Committee attacks freedom of the air and pro-
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